Phoenix Election riot

The Phoenix Election riot beginning on November 8, 1898 was a riot and mass lynching by white South Carolinians in the name of Redemption in Greenwood County, South Carolina. Over a dozen prominent black leaders were murdered and hundreds were injured by a white mob.

This election cycle was the first since the 1895 Constitution of South Carolina disenfranchised black voters. The small town of Phoenix was the home of the land-owning white Tolbert family. Its patriarch John R. Tolbert had risen to Colonel in the Confederate Army, but held to liberal principles, voted Republican, and encouraged the local black population to assert their rights.^[1] The state legislature had closed all Phoenix polls in 1868 to block the Tolbert's influence.

On election night 1898 an altercation at a Tolbert-owned store, a white Democratic partisan named J.I. Etheridge was shot and killed. This triggered four days of violence directed mainly at the black population. Three hundred heavily armed men gathered.^[2] An estimated twelve African-Americans were fatally shot or hung, through the 13th, when an elderly woman named Eliza Cooke was shot and killed. Whites who refused to join were also threatened.^[3] On the 9th the white mob on horseback encountered a four-year-old Benjamin Mays and his father, a moment that Mays "never forgot".^[4]

U.S. Senator Benjamin Tillman spoke in the area a year later, and was quoted as saying, "If you want to uproot the snake [of black voting] and kill it, go and kill the Tolberts." ^[5]

References

• Wells, Tom Henderson (1970). "The Phoenix Election Riots". Phylon. Clark Atlanta University. 31 (1): 58–69. doi:10.2307/273874. JSTOR 273874.  (subscription required)
• Wilk, Daniel Levinson (2002). "The Phoenix Riot and the Memories of Greenwood County". Southern Cultures. University of North Carolina Press. 8 (4): 29–55. doi:10.1353/scu.2002.0052.